Inventory management in a retail store, in other words avoiding having either too much or too little stock on hand, is of great practical importance. Having too much inventory can lower profits because of the cost to maintain the inventory. Having too little inventory can lower profits when product is not available at the point of purchase to meet consumer demand.
Maintaining inventory in a retail environment is expensive for many reasons. The value of the inventory itself may be substantial for expensive consumer items like cell phones and other electronics. The time value of the money tied up in that inventory gets bigger as the value of the inventory climbs, and the longer the inventory sits on the shelf. The high cost of retail space is behind the rise of efficient sales operations like kiosks that can produce relatively high sales and inventory turnover with very little space. Inventory storage consumes space that could be used for other retail store operations, like product display, face to face sales, aisles, and a check out counter with cash register. For these and many other reasons, having too much inventory erodes profitability.
At the same time, it is extremely important for a retail store to have enough inventory available to meet immediate sale requirements. Not only must there be a sufficient quantity of inventory, that inventory must be made up of the right product mix, to be able to meet the changing needs and tastes of consumers. To effectively compete with lower-cost channels such as internet or mail order resellers, a retail store must be able to deliver a product in hand at the point of sale at the moment the consumer wants it, even if customer demand is variable and hard to predict.
The damage caused by insufficient inventory goes straight to the bottom line of a retail store operation. A customer who cannot buy because the retailer is out of stock may shop elsewhere, a loss of the immediate sale never to be made up. The lost sale is even more damaging if consumers begin to view the retailer as unreliable, eroding customer goodwill and possibly risking supplier relationships as sales drop off. Especially for hot items with a limited season or product lifetime and for products with a long lead-time to replenish inventory, insufficient stock can be a real problem for a retail store.
The problem of inventory management is particularly challenging for expensive consumer items like cell phones and similar devices like laptop or tablet computers, because these devices are continually evolving in terms of features and technology. The relatively short lifetimes of these types of products increases the risk that stock will become obsolete and see its resale value drop dramatically.
Inventory management for retail sales of cell phones and similar communications devices, in particular, is difficult for a second reason. These devices are sold with service contracts for connecting to cellular communication networks. Even within a particular cellular communication network provider, a particular make and model of a cell phone can be packaged and sold with a service contract under any of several brands owned by a particular cellular communication network provider (or under a store brand), under any of several different terms or rate plans (e.g. monthly or prepaid, data-heavy or no-data), and with packaging and documentation in multiple languages or other localization. Each brand, for example, could target a different market channel or demographic, even though they all connect to the same cellular network.
Thermoformed plastic containers are well known as inexpensive and highly customizable containers for the sale of a wide variety of products, everything from cell phones to deli meats. Thermoformed plastic containers are typically transparent and rigid, so they can give a consumer the ability to examine a product closely without actually touching it. They can be made tamper-resistant, to reduce the risk that the product could be damaged or contaminated. They are typically lightweight, and can be efficiently stored or shipped together in a nested fashion.
What is needed is a thermoformed container that is specially adapted to allow a cell phone (or similar product) to be partially packaged at one time and place, and then at a later time adapted for sale as a finished product with a particular brand (from a variety of brands or trademarks), and/or with a particular service plan (from a variety of rate plans or payment terms and/or languages) and/or with a particular language (or other localization) at a second time and place.